Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  She had already been talking for some time to him about her dissertation: on the Burranghyatti women, not in terms of their traditional life but in their semi-reservationised state. Those women who were forced to leave the hearing tent during crucial male evidence – what of them? Had they possessed greater parity of ritual power and authority in their traditional desert life than male anthropologists had suspected? Or was it the crisis of coming in from the desert to the reservation which had diminished the male elders and given the women a new authority? Auger had referred Prim to the only other literature then available in this area. A dazzling article, he said, written in the seventies by a professor from the University of Minnesota, Dr Joyce Ackland. His praise for the material was spacious enough to make Prim faintly jealous, until Auger produced a conference program in which photographs of those who delivered the papers appeared, and Prim was despicably pleased to find Professor Ackland homely and nearing sixty.

  Ackland, in any case, had written on the subject more from a traditional anthropological point of view. The thesis of her article was that the provision of stored and bore water via taps had altered the balance between men and water. It had taken urgency out of male rites designed to ensure the recurrence of water, the ceremonial maintaining of water sources in the desert being up until then substantially men’s business. For it was the women who now turned on the reservation taps and fetched the water in jugs and pots from stand pipes. Or so Ackland’s proposition went.

  But Auger, though he admired Ackland’s article, wondered whether the women’s social powers had been increased not by tap water but by the way men succumbed to disorientation, bad diet, gaol and alcoholism. He showed Prim another article, by a West Australian academic – another elderly woman – who argued that, in their traditional life, women had had significant ritual input into maintaining water holes. Their new familiarity with taps, banal as such water might seem but ever a miraculous mother in the desert, was not a supplanting of the men but a continuation of female powers possessed before the reservation was put in place.

  So Prim was to write a dissertation on both views and either reinforce one over the other, or reach a new synthesis of both. On a minute research grant, she spent two blistering months interviewing two middle-aged desert women, the Pidanu sisters, who had taken, at their christening by Lutheran missionaries in the 1960s, the names Betty and Dottie. She sat with them by the hour, playing gin rummy before, out of politeness, out of pure kindness, they took her, sometimes together, sometimes separately, to some local women’s sites within hiking distance. At a cave beyond Mount Bavaria, the sisters each told her, sundry totemic beast-men, birdmen, lizard-children, disguising themselves as infants, persuaded a female ancestor, Kabiddi, to spill her milk for the convenience and succour of humankind.

  Before she could attend any women’s rites associated with this and other mysteries, Prim was privileged to find herself led off at dusk to a low escarpment near Turner Creek where, with white clay on her forehead and painful smoke from eucalyptus boughs in her eyes – the women smoking her ignorance out of her – she was admitted to the first, infant version of initiation. Great mysteries awaited her; she was certain of what would be a limitless, career-long association with these women, their aunts, daughters, nieces. She was a modern anthropologist, not looking at them through a long lens, but their intimate. For she was interested in all that awaited them – the solar-powered telephone, the satellite television – and not simply in the exotic aspects of where they had been in their previous, nomadic existence. And she would as a reward be one of those scholars who were named referentially, reverentially, in journals. ‘Bettany’s pioneering work with the Burranghyatti women in the Mount Bavaria region …’ She would, of course, be argued with by later scholars on the scene, but her authority would supersede theirs. And in the tent courts, or the courts convened in some community hall in remoter Australia, she would serve the Burranghyatti people eloquently when they made their claims.

  Returned to Sydney, Prim wrote a confident and combative dissertation – a critique both of Ackland and of the other scholar, Judith Verner – studded with footnotes from Strehlow to Tindale to Auger. Auger, who was a computer whiz, introduced her to the then fresh wonder of word processing and what it could do for a dissertation. ‘I don’t know how anything got written before the PC,’ he told her.

  Her writing ran parallel to her affair, which, though by now it made her as much miserable as ecstatic, she saw as her destiny. She entered a calm but firm phase of her discourse with Auger on the subject of what she called ‘an honest confrontation’ with his wife. The more Prim argued, and the more he delayed, the more a certain sort of confidence grew in her, something hollow, stale, yet somehow rampant and addictive. She became the demanding party in sex, he the frightened one who wanted to retreat to a few well-tried options. It was love in a kind of war. She was strangely delighted when Auger, gushing into her, yelled like an angry peon delivered of a load. ‘Oh Christ,’ he would say, ‘that’s it, that’s it.’ His voice seemed also to threaten that she might have earned other, fiercer degradations, and these would be delivered in time. It was amazing to her how long she was willing to live like this, in a kind of unresolved tranquillity.

  Her dissertation done, she gave the computer disk and one of two copies she had printed from it to Auger’s office. Then she applied to be admitted to the doctoral program at Sydney. Her fellow graduates, she was vaguely aware, nodded and said, ‘Of course, of bloody course.’ For they were applying to other places, to the University of Western Australia, to Northwestern or UCLA or Constanz or Tubingen. But they understood why she wanted to stay with Auger. After the event she would wonder at their casual good humour when more malice was justified.

  Auger’s office, near the university’s renowned neo-Gothic quadrangle, was crowded with paintings of Central Australian dreamings from a range of desert cultures, carved birds from Arnhem Land decorated in the ‘X-ray’ style which celebrated the creatures’ chief internal organs, and a spectacular bone casing with a shark painted on it. When she’d first visited it as an undergraduate, the office had impressed Prim as a sort of druid’s cave, imbued with all that saved Australia, in her eyes, from its own torpor: the romance of the Aboriginal cosmology.

  Now she was due to visit it because there was a perfunctory note from Auger in her mailbox, a note without the intimacy of an envelope. It asked her to visit his office any time from three onwards.

  So she went. In this mood she was more ready to be robust, jolly, bossy with him than to be afraid at his unaccustomed mode of summons. When she went in there was a kind of shyness in Auger as he came around his desk, held her almost perfunctorily by the shoulders and kissed her cheek.

  ‘I know what all this means,’ she said, thinking he was about to tell her she had not been accepted into the doctoral program. He was about to tell her that there had been some fierce doctoral committee argument about her that he had lost.

  He asked her to sit and they faced each other like strangers on opposite sides of the desk. ‘Prim, listen. There’s a problem with your dissertation,’ he said at last. Her expectations fell another notch. Her Master’s would be delayed.

  He explained he had read her dissertation first and was concerned, ‘for your sake as much as anyone’s’. So he passed it on to Professor Rabin, because he wanted ‘a more detached view’.

  Prim would ever after remember precisely the way he looked out, levelly but with a small, painful, magisterial squint into the bright leafy trees across the lane, waving above rowdy students on their way to alfresco study in the Holme courtyard. She had a sudden sense that he was going to cast her off.

  ‘So, you’re going to send me for another spin around the block,’ she said, and tried to laugh.

  ‘Well, you see, I just wish I could.’

  ‘Come on, Robert. Don’t wish things. Tell me.’

  He looked at her, his eyes not quite engaging, his face pale.

 
‘Prim, it looks like you’ve put yourself outside my help.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I find undigested lumps of Verner and Ackland in the middle of your dissertation. I mean, we all draw on each other in a way, but we’re supposed to go through a process of making the scholarship our own and finding our own voice.’

  Prim said, ‘That’s crazy. I referred to Ackland mainly to challenge some of her conclusions.’

  Auger passed her dissertation. ‘Why don’t you look at page 25 from the paragraph beginning “On the basis of this evidence …”’

  She took the marked pages. She still had residual faith that what she had written was in place, there in the text, amenable to calm explanation. But the passage was nothing that she had written, or remembered, or even particularly agreed with.

  ‘I didn’t write this,’ she told him.

  ‘Prim … that’s the normal student denial.’ So he had reduced her in a few seconds from friend, lover and colleague to temporising student.

  She knew instantly what he had done. He had acted with a criminal determination no one would believe him capable of. For the sake of his grievous marriage, and to evade the frenzied lover asking, ‘When? When?’ he had altered her dissertation at source, on the disk. He had butchered it, robbed it of its connections, emasculated its argument and introduced undigested lumps of Verner and Ackland. Short of strangling her, he was sending her into thorough exile. He was extirpating her. And she knew even then that no one would believe he had gone to all this trouble.

  His voice trembled as he read a series of page notations he had jotted down on a notepad. ‘Turn to page 37, please. Then pages 42, 46 to 48, 53 to 55 …’

  ‘You did this,’ she said. He who was clever at word processors in an age when many scholars were still fighting a delaying war against them. He could – as the new phrase had it – ‘desk-top publish’ scholarly newsletters. So he had spent dark hours to alter matter through cut, paste, copy; to devise a new version of her dissertation. She flicked the pages and found the font correct but the contents largely strange. ‘You did this, Robert.’

  ‘Prim,’ he said, looking out the window again, ‘do you know how mad that sounds. I haven’t betrayed you. You’ve betrayed me.’ He seemed genuinely to believe it. ‘It’s like this – I don’t think for a moment your direct purpose was to cheat. You don’t need to. But I think you were actually testing me. Seeing if I would cover for you. Well, we may be great friends, Prim. But I can’t cover for you on this.’

  Everything was apparent to Prim now. ‘You want to get rid of me – from the university. From all scholarly life. You don’t want to be worried by me. You want your shitty marriage.’

  ‘That’s hysterical,’ Auger said. Men could say that, hands spread concessively, chin lowered. It was one of their best tricks.

  ‘My God, I didn’t want to test you. I wanted to impress you. And I did. The real text. Weren’t you impressed?’

  ‘I can’t be impressed with that,’ he said, nodding to the text in her hands.

  ‘I have another copy of what I wrote at home.’

  ‘Of course you do,’ he said. ‘After all, weeks have passed since you put this one in.’

  ‘Look, Robert, you know me. I’ve got too much intellectual vanity to play this sort of game.’ Could someone else have done it, altered the text? A jealous woman student? ‘Someone has tampered with this, and if it’s not you, then I apologise.’

  ‘I should think so,’ said Auger. ‘You do me very little credit, Prim.’

  ‘How much credit do you do me?’ she asked.

  ‘Dr Rabin and I are required to report this to the dean.’

  ‘This beggars belief,’ said Prim. She stood up and walked about the office.

  He knew he had routed her now. ‘I can’t avoid it. I have only to wait until another graduate student, or an academic working in this area seeks out your dissertation, and they’ll notice it too, what Rabin and I have already noticed. It’s a gross lift, Prim. I know I’m partly to blame for the fact you haven’t been happy–’

  ‘Don’t you presume you can talk about my happiness,’ she warned him. So he was happy to give that up, the consoling tone, and fall back on his habitual authority, that of a tenured academic eminent in his field.

  ‘Well, I just know this whole time has been very stressful for you, Prim. I know what you wanted out of our relationship. If I have added to your anguish in any way …’

  ‘In any way?’

  ‘We can get you therapy,’ he offered.

  ‘Get therapy yourself,’ she told him. She grew dizzy with an enormous just rage. She was determined against the odds to be believed by somebody.

  ‘In any case,’ said Auger, ‘the dean is waiting to see you.’

  ‘If I see the dean, I’ll tell him everything.’

  ‘So we’ve already got round to vengefulness, have we, Prim? I’ve already approached the dean, and confessed my association with you. There’s forgiveness for lapses of sexual morality, Prim. But none for plagiarism.’

  It was still incomprehensible: the last ten months described as a lapse! She could not find any handhold on such a fatuous word. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I very much want to see the dean.’

  But the interview she had when she got to the dean’s office was marked by the same kind of uncomprehending, brutal words Auger had uttered. One of them – again – was ‘lapse’, another was ‘counselling’. ‘But I can produce a copy of the dissertation in its true form,’ said Prim. ‘I’m sure you could,’ said the dean. ‘The point is the copy you did submit. And whatever it meant, whatever your motive … attention-getting or otherwise … it’s still plagiarism.’

  She must face reality, the dean told her, and admit the plagiarism. Otherwise the matter would have to be taken to the post-graduate committee and higher. After her excellent record, he was willing to accept that this had been an aberration created by stress. ‘You may have,’ he suggested tentatively, ‘without deliberately knowing it, wanted to bring your unfortunate relationship with Professor Auger, the details of which he has confided to me, to a conclusion, and subconsciously thought the best way to do that was to offend him.’ It was a sentence she laughed at madly at the time. A pompous, half-thought-out, Auger-suggested and amateurish stab at a psychological explanation.

  When she told the dean that Auger had altered her dissertation, the dean politely called that paranoia. If it were the truth, anyhow, she could appeal. But with the greatest respect, the dean did not believe it.

  The depiction of her as one who plagiarised for attention brought on disabling rage, then and later. It was so vast and appalling an accusation that she thought it capable of snuffing out her life with its hugeness. It proved to be an accusation that grew within her like a foreign, unchosen organism clamped around her vitals. Its malign nature made any further contest with these men, and with the man Auger, impossible to tolerate. Prim could neither confess to plagiarism nor throw herself on their mercy; neither take up their proffered counselling nor appeal to the vice-chancellor or the university senate. She could not bear to have the accusations, the comforting myth of attention-seeking, a plausible one in male eyes, raised again. She knew it would simply kill her.

  She walked out of the university gates on Missenden Road and caught a cab home. There she found Brendan D’Arcy and Dimp drinking. She numbly drank some champagne with them and told them nothing.

  ‘How is the thesis?’ asked D’Arcy lightly, though he was so engrossed in his own happiness he did not wait for an answer. They insisted on taking her with them to a restaurant, where she conversed like a living being with a stake in things. It was only after she had been in the women’s lavatory for half an hour that Dimp came looking for her.

  ‘I’m giving up the university,’ Primrose turned from the mirror to tell her sister.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Dimp put a hand on her sister’s shoulder. ‘What is it?’
/>   ‘All you have to know for now is I’m leaving.’

  ‘That bloody Auger,’ said Dimp. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  I will not weep at a name, Prim promised herself.

  Dimp said, ‘You must hate me for not doing more.’

  ‘Why? You’re innocent.’

  ‘I should have intervened. I could read the omens, but I was too busy with Bren.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Jesus, I should have warned you.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t have listened.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’ll go somewhere. You know what? I’d like to go to another country. What I mean is, another culture. Somewhere where I’m considered an aberration. Ugly if possible. No, maybe not ugly. That’s self-pity. I’d like to go somewhere I’m considered neutral. A non-player.’

  ‘Where could that be?’ Dimp asked.

  ‘I have some ideas,’ said Prim. ‘I have a degree, and some references from earlier in my career.’

  ‘Come back to the table,’ Dimp said softly, taking her arm.

  ‘I can’t.’

  In fact, Prim barely emerged from the house in Redfern for the next three months. A strength in her forbade either suicide or full-blown mental illness, but in the end, for the sake of not being eaten alive nocturnally by the ridiculous remembered sentences of the dean and of Auger, she was forced to take a course of anti-depressants, hating herself the more, as if she were fulfilling out of a pill bottle the predictions of Auger, and comporting herself according to his lies.

  Ultimately she went to Canberra, the national capital, a derisory choice of domicile for most Sydneysiders, and worked for an aid body, or NGO (non-government organisation), as such instrumentalities liked to call themselves. This one was named Austfam, was active in the South Pacific and Asia, and had a presence since the East African famines of the 1970s in Ethiopia, and a small office in the Sudan.